A Language of Smiles

Maybe I’m easy to please, but doing this a few times makes me giggle. “Eeee.”

Actually, I suspect it’s not just me. Saying “eeee” pulls up the corners of the mouth and makes you start to smile. That’s why we say “cheese” to the camera, not “choose” or “chose.” And, I think, it’s why I don’t get the giggles from “aaaa” or “oooo.”

The mere act of smiling is often enough to lift your mood; conversely, the act of frowning can lower it; scowling can make you feel fed up. In other words, the gestures you make with your face can — at least to some extent — influence your emotional state.
(The notion that facial expressions affect mood isn’t new. Edgar Allan Poe used it in his story “The Purloined Letter”: one character reports that when he wishes to know someone’s mind, he attempts to compose his face to mimic the expression of that someone — then waits to see which emotions arise. And the idea was developed, in different ways, by both Charles Darwin and William James. But telling stories and developing arguments is one thing. Showing, experimentally, that making a face can make a mood is harder; it’s only in the past 30 years or so that data have started to accumulate.)

Exactly how frowns and smiles influence mood is a matter of debate. One possibility is classical conditioning. Just as Ivan Pavlov conditioned a dog to associate the sound of a bell with the expectation of food, the argument goes, so humans quickly come to associate smiling with feeling happy. Once the association has been established, smiling is, by itself, enough to generate happy feelings. Another possibility is that different facial gestures have intrinsic properties that make them more or less pleasant, perhaps by altering the way that blood flows to the brain.

But here’s what interests me. As anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language will know, different languages make you move your face in different ways. For instance, some languages contain many sounds that are forward in the mouth; others take place more in the throat. What’s more, the effects that different languages have on the movements of the face are substantial. Babies can tell the difference among languages based on the speaker’s mouth movements alone. So can computers.

Which made me wonder: do some languages contain an intrinsic bias towards pulling happy faces? In other words, do some languages predispose — in a subtle way — their speakers to be merrier than the speakers of other languages?

As far as I can tell, no one has looked at this. (It doesn’t mean no one has; it just means I haven’t been able to find it.) But I did find a smidgen of evidence to suggest the idea’s not crazy. A set of experiments investigating the effects of facial movements on mood used different vowel sounds as a stealthy way to get people to pull different faces. (The idea was to avoid people realizing they were being made to scowl or smile.) The results showed that if you read aloud a passage full of vowels that make you scowl — the German vowel sound ü, for example — you’re likely to find yourself in a worse mood than if you read a story similar in content but without any instances of ü. Similarly, saying ü over and over again generates more feelings of ill will than repeating a or o.

Of course, facial gestures aren’t the whole story of emotions; moreover, languages can potentially influence emotions in many other ways. Different languages have different music — sounds and rhythms — that could also have an emotional impact. The meanings of words may influence moods more than the gestures used to make them. And just as the words a language uses to describe colors affects how speakers of that language perceive those colors, different languages might allow speakers to process particular emotions differently; this, in turn, could feed into a culture, perhaps contributing to a general tendency towards gloom or laughter.

Separating these various factors will be difficult, and the overall impact on mood through the facial gestures of a language may well be small, if indeed it exists at all. Nevertheless, I’d love to know whether some languages, by the contortions they give the mouth, really do have an impact on their speakers’ happiness. If it turns out that there is a language of smiles, I’d like to learn it. In the meantime: have a giggle with “meeeeeee.”

Notes:

For a fascinating overview of experiments on frowning, smiling and mood, see McIntosh, D. N. 1996. “Facial feedback hypotheses: evidence, implications, and directions.” Motivation and Emotion 20: 121-147. This paper also discusses possible ways that facial expressions can influence emotions including both the conditioning idea and the blood flow idea. Further experimental results can be found in, for example, Kleinke, C. L., Peterson, T. R., and Rutledge, T. R. 1998, “Effects of self-generated facial expressions on mood,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74: 272-279; see also Schnall, S. and Laird, J. D., “Keep smiling: Enduring effects of facial expressions and postures on emotional experience and memory,” Cognition and Emotion 17: 787-797; Flack, W. F. 2006, “Peripheral feedback effects of facial expressions, bodily postures, and vocal expressions on emotional feelings,” Cognition and Emotion 20: 177-195; and Duclos, S. E. and Laird, J. D. 2001, “The deliberate control of emotional experience through control of expressions,” Cognition and Emotion 15: 27-56.

Poe’s purloined letter can be read here. Darwin’s arguments about emotions can be found in his book, first published in 1872, “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals”; James’s arguments are described in his book, first published in 1890, “The Principles of Psychology.”

For evidence that facial movements can affect the way blood flows to the brain, see McIntosh, D. N. et al. 1997, “Facial movement, breathing, temperature, and affect: Implications of the vascular theory of emotional efference,” Cognition and Emotion 11: 171-195.

For babies telling the difference among languages based on lip movements, see Weikum, W. M. et al. 2007, “Visual language discrimination in infancy,” Science 316: 1159. For computers being able to do this, see Newman, J. L. and Cox. S. J. 2009. “Automatic visual-only language identification: a preliminary study,” IEEE Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing vols 1-8: 4345-4348. A less technical account of the results are given here.

For my smidgen of evidence that the faces you pull when speaking a language can affect your mood, see Zajonc, R. B., Murphy, S. T. and Inglehart, M. 1989, “Feeling and facial efference: implications of the vascular theory of emotion,” Psychological Review 96: 395-416. This paper describes what happens if you read stories full of the “ü” sound, or are made to repeat it over and over again.

The idea that the words in a language can affect the thought processes of the speakers is often attributed to Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf; it has been controversial. However, some recent experimental evidence supports it, at least when it comes to processing colors. See, for example, Winawer, J. et al. 2007. “Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104: 7780-7785 and Regier, T. and Kay, P. 2009, “Language, thought, and color: Whorf was half right,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13: 439-446. The idea that emotions might be similarly affected has been discussed by Perlovsky, L. 2009, “Language and emotions: Emotional Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” Neural Networks 22: 518-526.

This piece grew out of a conversation with Ismael Ludman about the different muscles used for speaking Spanish and German: many thanks. Many thanks also to Dan Haydon and Gideon Lichfield for insights, comments and suggestions.

I am part of the shared lab of Janis Antonovics and Douglas Taylor at the University of Virginia. We often say “Disease” when taking pictures (Janis studies the ecological dynamics of disease). Same effect, right?

The human ethologist Irenäus Eibel-Eibesfeldt may know the answer to the question whether language, smiles and happiness relate. He used a camera lens with a mirror that permitted him to film the facial expressions of unsuspecting bystanders unnoticed. Filming in this fashion, he and his colleagues were able to identify archetypal face expressions common across cultures, suggesting that such behavior is innate. The raising of the eye brows to signal readiness for social interaction constitutes one example. He also studied smiles.

The UCLA phonologist Bruce Hayes made the observation that Southern Californians can ask, “How are you?” all while smiling and showing their teeth. I would put the Southern Californian variety of English near the top of your list—but you might have to tease out the influence of all that excessive sunshine on their levels of happiness!

The best Universal Language !
Smile is the Unique selling proposition of human race
as the other creation cannot smile, even
kookaburra has a semblance of Laughter
but not the real one, here we are different
May be why we are crown of creation
It is disarming, enlivening and comforting
the poorest is he/she who cannot smile
It takes 12 muscles to smile, while
It takes 82 muscles to frown, hence
Laughter is the best medicine !

Be sure to read all the way down through section 5, where Gladwell describes how researchers noticed that making certain facial expressions for a research project induced the strong feelings in them that are associated with those facial expressions. Fascinating!

You suggest that the different facial expressions different languages tend toward could possibly effect the overall mood of the culture that speaks that language. Could the reverse also be true: that the the general mood of a culture can help determine the sounds of its language as a language develops and progresses? A happy culture would then tend to using the sound ‘eeee’ and a more frustrated one the German ‘u’ with the umlaut? This of course would not discount the the possibility that facial expressions can effect the mood of a culture. Both forces, all with many others, could work at the same time.

Your last comment about languages. My former company sent me all over the world. The language I like hearing the best is Thai, spoken by women (unsurprisingly, I am male). And Thailand likes to call itself “Land of Smiles”.

If you investigate this subject, you might consider looking into this.

Americans in Paris have endless opportunity to tease the French character, which alternately charms us and drives us mad.

I’ve been waiting years for a discussion of this phenomenon.

I was once told by a Parisian woman that the most important thing for a French man was to ‘appear intelligent’, on the Metro, at dinner or in the boudoire. Those vowels, and the little filler sounds of the French language, create that singular pursed lipped frown that you would make if you were a child trying to look like a professor. Both High Level French and the Queen’s English seem to come out better if spoken while looking sternly down ones nose. (Bonjour. Comment allez-vouz?)

The Italian’s, true to their character, use sounds far more conducive to smiles and laughter. (Cara! come stai?)

We love both for those very qualities. Chicken or egg…it can’t be an accident.

Let me notice that I heard about some experiments how people “withstand” languages they do not understand. The best was perceived Russian, the worst German.

But I must say that some deeper thoughts presented in German – especially filoshophical ones – are almost impossible to translate exactly into English. They lost some of their “sap”. The same for German translation into Czech or Slovak languages. Philosopher and biologist professor Stanislav Komarek (Uni Prague) presented opinion that German biological thinking is like a dynamite – it can cause also many damages. He think that English is unable to to go so deep and that’s why darwinism prevailed. On the other hand darwinism can’t do any harm.

Whorf might be also right in how language by stressing some grammaticar strucures shape our perception of world and ourselves. For instance Slavonic laguages can be called “sexual” in general. Women and men use different grammar – especially suffixes. You always know who is speaking regarding his/her gender. Sentences like “I would love you” cannot be translated from English unless you know who told them. Woman say in Slovak “Miloval-a by so ta” and man “Miloval by som ta”. Diminutives are another part of language missing in German and English – here even more.

Shopenhauer was of opinion that when a language arise it is perfect. During the time it degenerates loosing cases, suffixes etc…
Something contradicting the way evolution in Nature should proceed.

I wish Ms. Judson hadn’t picked the German ü for her example–it just plays to erroneous stereotypes about dour Germans. By that example, the gregarious people of München have to fight against a bad mood brought on by their city’s name, but they’ll be happy to say auf wiedersehen with its long eee sound. I’m not saying she doesn’t have a point, but picking on the Germans is not a fair way to make it. Why not use Danish? It has a vowel, ø , similar in sound to the German ü. Oh,but Danes are often rated the happiest of societies in studies of attitude and outlook on life, so I guess that’s not a good example..

I think you only have part of the picture. Some animals also smile without having to say “eeeee”. Dogs are prone to smiling, as are some cats & I believe also some horses, and it is evident that our simian relations also smile. Animal smiles appear to be also expressions of happiness & can be associated with movement of other body parts. A smiling dog will toss in frantic tail wagging to express his joy at the same time as smiling (if he has a tail that can wag).

Yet, they do not use language in the way you suggest may effect human mood.

I look forward to further research on smiling, but suspect you should add animal smiles in to get a fuller picture.

Cheery idea. Intuitively persuasive. When I let a smile be my umbrella I’m happier being wet than I am when I’m frowning and dry under my material umbrella. I’m sure smilers with knives are happier than frowners with same. And I would certainly volunteer to take part in the research.

Smiling and acting happy, even when it’s put-on at first, definitely will raise your mood. The first job I ever had, while in high school and college, was as a grocery clerk. My bosses, partners in an independent supermarket just outside town, set the example and at first repeatedly told me how well it worked, trying repeatedly to get me to try it. I was considered a pretty sobersided kid, so it took some doing, but their always bright and cheerful mood helped.

There would be days when, after school and the long bicycle ride out to the market, I didn’t feel at all like smiling, but as soon as the apron was on and I was out bagging groceries or at the register, talking up customers, smiling and trying to make them feel good about our store, there I was feeling better myself. Soon, just like George and Vic, my bosses, the first thing I would do after arriving at work was to find something to laugh about, buck myself up, get out there and act cheerful. Within a half hour it was genuine, and I was enjoying every minute of it.

Zip forward several years, and there is the same guy as a junior officer in the US Army or, later, a business manager, and the same thing is still true, only now his subordinates are motivated and made happier, their day in a tough job lightened by it. It doesn’t mean being a jocular backslapper and everybody’s friend, but just smiling and taking things a little easier. Not only does it work on oneself, it’s contagious.

I teach Buddhist meditation at meditate-thailand.com….one of the first things we do when introducing loving-kindness practice is to have people sit and put even a slight smile on their faces…even if they have to fake it a little a first…

it produces excactly this effect: uplifting the mind, making the mind servicable for calming and insight…without it, meditation is very dry and fragile.

“Actually, I suspect it’s not just me. Saying “eeee” pulls up the corners of the mouth and makes you start to smile. That’s why we say “cheese” to the camera, not “choose” or “chose.”
This beginning reminded me that I don’t have enough patience for Olivia Judson.
Dear, Olivia. One can’t smile and and say “cheese” at the same time. One can grimace and say “cheese.” As someone who got totally scared when she saw the first scary face in this new land of hers and wanted to flee immediately, I know what I am talking about (unlike Olivia).
Similarly, displaying many “references” doesn’t make something “scientific.
“When it comes to mood adjustment, is it possible that putting on a happy face might actually work?” No, it doesn’t. Genuinely expressive loving/”feeling” face probably can.

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Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist, writes every Wednesday about the influence of science and biology on modern life. She is the author of “Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex.” Ms. Judson has been a reporter for The Economist and has written for a number of other publications, including Nature, The Financial Times, The Atlantic and Natural History. She is a research fellow in biology at Imperial College London.